Hugh Trevor-Roper

Paul Lewis, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Monday, January 27, 2003

Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian who wrote a best-selling account of Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker but damaged his reputation 35 years later by authenticating forged Hitler diaries, died Sunday in Oxford, England. He was 89.

"The Last Days of Hitler," published in 1947, was based on the official investigation into Hitler's fate conducted by Mr. Trevor-Roper as a wartime officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

Relying mainly on interviews with captured Nazi leaders and others close to Hitler, Mr. Trevor-Roper established that Hitler's new wife, Eva Braun, took poison and Hitler shot himself at about 3:30 p.m. on May 1, 1945, as Soviet forces advanced on the Reich Chancellery's bunker and that their bodies were burned in the yard.

The book also painted an extraordinary picture of a deluded, isolated Nazi leadership holed up in the bunker and believing right up to the end that it would turn defeat into victory.

The investigation sought to establish once and for all that Hitler was dead since his remains had not been found.

The Soviet Union had denied finding any trace of the bodies when it captured the bunker. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told President Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 that he thought Hitler was alive and living in Spain or Argentina.

Although Mr. Trevor-Roper was certain that Hitler had committed suicide, he concluded that Hitler's remains were unlikely to be found. "Like (the Visigoth king) Alaric, buried secretly under the riverbed of Busento, the modern destroyer of mankind is now immune from discovery," he wrote.

In the 1990s it was learned that the Russians had taken Hitler's jaw and a fragment of his skull back to Moscow but buried the remainder of the bodies at Magdeberg, in East Germany, where they were destroyed on Leonid I. Brezhnev's orders in 1970.

Mr. Trevor-Roper's scholarly reputation suffered a shattering reverse in April 1983 when he held the regius chair of modern history at Oxford and had been created Lord Dacre of Glanton. He authenticated about 60 volumes said to be Hitler's diaries.

The diaries were then sold by the German magazine Stern to the Times newspaper group in London. A few days later, he reversed himself, saying he had "misunderstood the nature of their procurement" and now doubted their authenticity.

A month later, the German government said chemical testing proved they were fakes. In 1985, Konrad Kujau, the Stuttgart, Germany, dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Stern obtained the documents, was convicted of fraud in the case.

After his wartime service, he returned to teach at Christ Church and quickly established a reputation as a controversialist -- one who believes that ideas can prompt social change -- with right-of-center views who had little sympathy for leftist scholars who took a more determinist view of history.

Although he published a biography of Archbishop Laud, Charles I's Puritan- baiting archbishop of Canterbury, in 1940, Mr. Trevor-Roper produced no single great work of scholarship on the 16th or 17th centuries, his preferred field of study. Most of his published work took the form of essays.

Mr. Trevor-Roper's approach to history was based not so much on original research as on wide reading and an ability to bring to bear on his subjects insights derived from other disciplines. He sought to appeal to a wide, cultivated audience.

In his inaugural lecture as regius professor, he defended this approach, saying modern history would have "dried up and perished long ago" without the contribution of economists, sociologists, philosophers, art historians and even anthropologists and psychologists.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Mr. Trevor-Roper engaged in a long-standing debate in the Economic History Review about whether the economic fortunes of the English landowning classes rose or fell in the century between 1540 and 1640 and what effect this had on the English civil war and the Cromwellian revolution.

Mr. Trevor-Roper argued that declining, impoverished gentry, battered by inflation, started the Puritan revolution as a revolt against the monarchy and its hangers-on whose power and privileges allowed them to profit from the economic crisis gripping the rest of the country.

The debate with two other prominent British historians was repeated on a wider canvas in the 1950s and 1960s in a magazine called Past and Present.

Mr. Trevor-Roper's appointment to the prestigious post of regius professor was also mired in controversy. It was made in 1957 by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a Conservative. Mr. Trevor-Roper won out over A.J.P. Taylor, another Oxford historian who badly wanted it. Taylor spent the rest of his life feuding with Mr. Trevor-Roper.

Three years later Mr. Trevor-Roper repaid his debt by effectively managing Macmillan's successful campaign to become chancellor of Oxford.

In 1980, he moved to Cambridge University to become master of Peterhouse, but quarreled with the college fellows, accusing them of being more interested in comfort than in scholarship.

Mr. Trevor-Roper's other works include "The Rise of Christian Europe"(1965),

"The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries"(1970) and "From Counter Reformation to Glorious Revolution" (1992).

In 1968 he published "The Philby Affair," a study of the notorious British traitor whom he had befriended when they were in the intelligence service together. He had been surprised to find Philby working there since he knew he had been a Communist in his youth.

But he predicted that had Philby not been compromised by his fellow traitor Guy Burgess, he would have become head of the service.

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